


Beloved

by Luthien



Series: After Everything [5]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Breakfast in Bed, Broken pottery, Established Relationship, F/M, Fix-It, Lovers' Quarrel, deeply even stupidly romantic, learning how to be together, more than once, people heroically flinging themselves off cliffs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-11-28 11:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20966078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthien/pseuds/Luthien
Summary: Jaime and Brienne have been married for two weeks and everything is fine - until it isn't.(Aka the story of how Brienne came to call Jaime "a most beloved husband" - which was alluded to in another story in this series.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of my Fix-it ficlets series. Basically, Jaime never went south to Cersei, and stayed in the North with Brienne. The stories in this series are not being written in chronological order, but if you want to read them that way the reading order is:
> 
> 1\. [A Momentous Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20091838) \- set at Winterfell the day of Sansa's Coronation  
2\. [Walking in the Sun Once More](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20841821) \- on board ship on the way from Winterfell to Tarth  
**3\. Beloved - set on Tarth, two weeks after Jaime and Brienne get married **  
4\. [Love is in the Little Things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20070313) \- Brienne has a cold and Jaime worries  
5\. [Is this the way love's supposed to be?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20864192) \- set during a summer heatwave on Tarth after they've been married for a while
> 
> Quite a few people asked me about this line in [Is this the way love's supposed to be?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20864192):
> 
> _Jaime would like to think that his name is in there somewhere, but it's clear she's too far gone to remember her own name right now, much less that of even a most beloved husband. (And he's not just saying that. She called him that once. Only once, but it's not something he's ever going to forget.)_
> 
> This is the story of how Brienne came to say that.

Brienne awakes with a shiver, not sure where she is or what's going on, but instantly awake like the soldier she still feels herself to be. It takes a moment for her to identify the fabric high above her head, and for it to resolve into the canopy of a large bed rather than the ceiling of a tent.

She shivers again as something, as light and ticklish as a feather, glides along her bare arm. It's as if the soft touch is lighting a path along her skin, waking it from slumber, suddenly awake and aware. She lets out a shuddering breath, her heart racing, and turns her head. Jaime watches her across the pillow, his fingertips still stroking softly along the underside of her arm.

"Good morning," he says, and there's a smile in his eyes that's never for anyone but Brienne.

"Good morning," she replies, but her eyes are already darting towards the window, where the morning light is glimmering around the edges of the drapes. It's on the tip of her tongue to tell him to go, that he shouldn't have stayed so long, that _she_ feels the need to be discreet even if he doesn't. To tell him that they're no longer at Winterfell, where they were just two more knights amongst many and no one really cared who shared a bed with whom after everything that had gone before.

But then she blinks, remembering not just where she is but all that has happened since they arrived here. They're on Tarth, but they no longer need to be discreet. Their sharing a room, and a bed, is not just unremarkable. It's expected.

They've been married a fortnight, hardly any time at all, but it's still two weeks longer than Brienne ever expected to be married to anybody.

"You should put on your chemise," Jaime says, reaching over the side of the bed for his shirt.

"Why?" Brienne doesn't feel cold under the covers, even though she isn't wearing a stitch of clothing, and she doesn't intend to get out of bed just yet, although she really should.

"They'll be here soon." Jaime's voice is slightly muffled as he slips the shirt on over his head.

"_Who_ will be here?" Brienne asks, sitting up, and then pulling the blankets up almost to her neck, just in case someone might burst in through the door at any minute.

"The servants who are bringing our breakfast up to us." Jaime's head pushes up through the neck of the shirt, and he gives her a slightly impish grin before settling back against the pillows.

Oh.

Brienne gives Jaime a hard stare, less alarmed now, though she doesn't let go of the covers. "Why would they be doing that?" she asks. "We always go downstairs to breakfast."

"I thought we might have breakfast here this time."

"And again I find myself asking: why?"

Jaime shrugs. "I just thought it might be nice to take a leisurely breakfast in bed with my wife for once. Does there have to be any more reason than that?"

Brienne's cheeks go hot, and she looks down at the quilt, noting the stylised wave pattern that has been embroidered in blue and silver thread onto the fabric. She still feels a little thrill go through her every time Jaime looks at her and says that word: wife. She's not sure that that's ever going to change. One day, when they're old and grey, if the gods spare them, he will call her 'wife' and she'll probably still colour up like a maiden.

"I suppose not," she manages to get out.

Someone raps on the bedroom door and Brienne only just stops herself from letting out a squeak of dismay.

"Wait!" she calls out, swinging her legs over the side of the bed as she frantically scans the room for her chemise. She spots it, lying on the floor beneath the window. _How by all that's holy did it end up over there?_ she wonders as she all but flies across the room to retrieve it and throw it over her nakedness.

She's back in bed, sitting very straight and prim against the pillows, or at least she hopes that what she looks like, when Jaime calls, "Enter!" and the door opens.

Two serving girls come in, each carrying a tray with little legs hanging beneath, and plates covered in silver cloches on top. A third servant hurries behind with another tray containing the tea things. There are some interesting aromas coming from those trays, and Brienne realises quite abruptly just how many hours it's been since she last ate.

She watches as one of the servants rounds the end of the bed and comes to her, carefully arranging a tray across her lap.

"Thank you, Ettie," she says. Brienne makes a point of knowing the names of all the household staff. Jaime usually looks slightly bemused when she calls the under servants by name—something that probably just isn't feasible to learn in an establishment the size of Casterly Rock or the Red Keep. But it's how they do things here on Tarth.

The girl steps back and drops a little curtsey. She doesn't meet Brienne's eyes, but instead her gaze strays across to the other side of the bed, where the other tray is being set down over Jaime's thighs.

Absurdly, Brienne feels her cheeks pinkening again. She looks down at her tray, wishing that all the servants would just leave the room, right now—or, even better, never have entered it in the first place.

"Milady?" It's the third servant, Alyce. The one with the tea tray.

Brienne forces herself to look up.

"Shall I leave the tea things here, for you to pour?" Alyce asks, indicating the broad, flat-topped chest beside the bed with a nod of her head.

"Yes, thank you," Brienne says.

Alyce curtseys in turn. Brienne watches as the three serving girls leave the room, and heaves a sigh of relief when at last the door closes behind them.

Jaime is already lifting the cloche from his plate. "Bread and cheese. Kippers. Fish tarts. And I do believe that's a slice of egg and seaweed pie," he says, poking at it with his fork. "I've been meaning to ask ever since I got here: is the concept of bacon unknown on Tarth?"

"Once the summer comes there will be bacon," Brienne tells him. "The pigs start breeding again in the spring. We don't slaughter them when they're busy making more pigs."

"Do they indeed?" He turns to look at her properly, an eyebrow raised speculatively. "And I'm sure they're not the only ones." He blinks, once, and there's the familiar heat in his eyes, along with the smile that's just for her. "Breeding, I mean."

_How does he do that?_ Brienne wonders, hurriedly taking a bite out of a fish tart to try to distract from the colour rushing into her cheeks yet again. _How can he turn an innocent conversation about breakfast and animal husbandry into something that's not innocent at all?_ And the worst part is that her main complaint about it is not the wicked look in Jaime's eye as he says it, or even the fact that he says it at all, but that the breakfast trays are providing an insurmountable, if temporary, barrier between them.

"Eat," she says, a little more forcefully than is perhaps warranted under the circumstances.

Jaime inclines his head to her and sketches a tiny bow, or as much of one as he can manage while sitting in bed with a tray over his legs, and eats. Brienne eats, too, though she casts a sideways glance at Jaime frequently. She doesn't think he notices, until his hand slips down, apparently unconsciously, between them and presses briefly but firmly against her hip. She starts, and half the breakfast things go sliding from one side of her tray to the other before she grabs it and steadies it. It's lucky she hasn't poured the tea yet.

"You're as jittery as a cat on ice," he tells her.

"No, I'm not," she says, turning to look at him fully.

"Oh, so you are willing to look at me after all." Jaime's eyes meet her own. It's their only point of connection; his hand is back resting on the edge of his breakfast tray. The warmth and teasing wickedness have left his eyes; now they're as cool as the green depths of one of Tarth's high mountain lakes.

"What?" Brienne says, her brow creasing so hard that the pressure sets off a tight little headache along the bottom of her forehead. "Of course I'm willing to look at you."

"This is the first time you've looked at me properly of your own volition since breakfast arrived. You didn't look at me at all while the servants were in the room. You could have been alone in here, for the amount of notice you took of me."

"But I wasn't alone," Brienne points out.

"No," Jaime says with a speaking look, though it appears to be in a foreign language because Brienne has absolutely no idea what it's supposed to mean.

"What? What's the problem?" Brienne really has no idea where this conversation has come from, and it seems to be quite out of her control.

"Forget about it," Jaime says. His expression has gone... not calm, exactly, but curiously blank. Remote, as if he's looking at her from some far off place, and his voice is level. Too level. "Tomorrow we'll have breakfast in the breakfast room, just as you prefer." He stabs a kipper with his fork, perhaps a little harder than is really required, and brings it to his mouth. He chews methodically, as if completely engrossed in eating his breakfast. It seems to be a signal that the conversation is over as far as Jaime's concerned.

Except, it isn't really a conversation, is it? It's a fight, but not like any they've had before—and they've had plenty: disagreements, arguments, full scale shouting matches. Their earliest acquaintance was nothing but disputes and verbal sparring. It's how they began the journey that ultimately led them here.

But this is the first real disagreement they've had since they stood in the sept and made their promises to each other. And it's possibly the stupidest fight they've ever had. It's about… nothing.

Isn't it?

Brienne doesn't know what to say, so she applies herself to her own plate of food and says nothing.

Eventually, Jaime pushes his tray away, with some little difficulty since he has to do this, as everything else, with a single hand, and the tray's small legs get stuck amongst the covers.

"Let me-" Brienne begins.

Jaime yanks the tray, hard, and the wooden tray leg closest to the side of the bed gives way. With a clatter, the tray tips sideways and it and its entire contents disappear over the edge of the bed, crashing to the floor a split second later. The plate smashes, small bits and pieces of pottery, and the odd kipper, flying across the room. The jangling ring of silver cutlery hitting hard, ancient oak floorboards seems to echo for long seconds.

Jaime gets out of bed. He's wearing the shirt from yesterday and nothing else. Any other time, Brienne would have appreciated the view, but now… She watches him in stunned silence.

He walks over to the door that leads to his dressing room. Brienne wants to tell him to be careful, walking in bare feet with shards of broken pottery everywhere, but something stops her. He's placing his feet with care, she notices—so he's not quite so removed from this room and everything in it as he'd like her to believe. She wonders if he's going to leave the room without saying another word to her—without even looking at her—but he stops, hand on the doorknob, and says over his shoulder, "I'll be at the marble mines this morning. Don't keep lunch for me." And then Jaime opens the door. In hardly much more than the time it takes for a heart to beat twice he's gone, and Brienne is left staring at a closed door.

What just happened?

Well, she isn't going to get any answers by just sitting here wondering. Brienne lifts her breakfast tray and sets it down on the empty—Jaime's—side of the bed, and gets up. She treads carefully across the room, mindful of how far the bits of broken pottery may have scattered, and raps once on the dressing room door before entering.

Jaime is sitting in a chair, still half-naked, his shirt partway off. One arm is still in its sleeve and the rest of the shirt is twisted somehow, stuck in place over his head.

"Let me help you," Brienne says quietly.

"I can manage," Jaime says, his words clipped and curt. His face is hidden in the depths of the shirt.

"Let me help you," Brienne repeats. "I'm your wife. That's my job."

"My wife. Ah, yes." Jaime sounds almost _bitter_.

Brienne's heart twists in her chest. What can she possibly have done to hurt him? Everything was fine only a few minutes ago. Wasn't it?

"_Yes_, your wife." Brienne tries to keep her voice firm and not betray the sharp, tearing emotions that are cutting at her inside like so many knives. "So tell me what I've done wrong. Tell me what I did that's upset you so. I want to understand. I want to _fix_ it."

Jaime's silent for a moment. For more than a moment. Brienne wonders if he's going to speak at all, but then, at last, he says, "Help me get out of this thing."

Brienne sighs, mingled relief and apprehension, and goes to help. At least she can do this right.

Once Jaime has been freed of his shirt, Brienne seats herself in the chair beside him. He's quite naked, which she'd normally find more than a little distracting, but right now all her attention is on his face. "So tell me," she says.

She waits, feeling the distance between them. Usually, when they're sitting so close together and alone in their rooms, they can't _not_ touch, whether it's simply the brush of a hand or a lip, or someone straddling someone else's lap. But they're not touching now. They could as easily be sitting on opposite sides of the room, except that they're close enough that Brienne can see into the depths of Jaime's eyes, closed off to her, and cold.

"It's an interesting word, 'wife'," Jaime says, sounding oddly conversational now, though that unsettling look in his eyes does not change. "I say it quite a lot. Perhaps you've noticed?"

"Of course," Brienne says at once. Up until a moment ago, that word on his lips was like an audible frisson of pleasure for her. Now, though...

"But it's not a word that works by itself. It's not a term that lives in isolation—much like a wife herself, in fact."

Brienne considers that for a moment, trying to ignore the sick feeling deep in her gut, as if she's swallowed a stone. "So you're saying that a wife has her husband." She's still not entirely sure where this is going, but she can hardly do anything but follow where the conversation leads, even as she dreads what its destination might prove to be.

"Husband. Yes, that's the word," Jaime agrees. "It's not a word you use much, though, is it?"

Brienne goes still. There's something deeply ironic in his saying the word in that particular tone. He doesn't sound like her husband. He sounds, almost, like the Kingslayer, cocky and sure as he lays a verbal trap.

"Maybe… maybe I don't say it often," she admits. If this is a trap, it's one she will willingly walk into, if only Jaime will look at her with warmth again. That special smile with which he greeted her in bed this morning seems a thousand years ago, and a thousand miles away as well.

It's true, she doesn't say 'husband' all that often, most particularly when anyone but Jaime is close enough to hear. But that's just her nature. She'll always be reticent, particularly when it comes to anything that truly matters to her. And what they have together, this thing between them, these… feelings, they're special, and private, something that belongs to just the two of them. Brienne doesn't want to share them with anybody else. Surely Jaime can see, surely he _knows_ that just because she isn't demonstrative in company, just because she doesn't say the words for anyone's ears but his… That doesn't mean she doesn't feel _deeply_. Just the opposite, in fact. If she felt less, she could say more. Then the words would come so much cheaper.

"Well, that's a start," Jaime says. Is Brienne imagining it, or is there the slightest glimmer of something warmer lurking in his eyes beyond the hard green barrier. He sounds something like himself again. Her Jaime, and not the prisoner she met at Riverrun several lifetimes ago.

Maybe she should explain herself, say exactly how she feels and say it plainly, in words, and not just in looks and deeds and actions. Though from what Jaime's said, there's been a lack of those too, when there's anyone there to see. She hasn't intended to shut him out, but she can't be anything but honest with herself, especially about something so important: she _has_ done it. Jaime's hurt is too clear for her to deny it.

Brienne doesn't want to talk about such things, because she _is_ reticent by nature—or maybe she wasn't once, but that's how the world has shaped her. Putting such, such… vulnerabilities into words is not something she wants to do. But living with this frigid barrier between them is something she wants even less. She couldn't bear it. She won't bear it. So, she takes a deep breath, and _tries_.

"You're my husband," she says as carefully as she can. "Everyone knows that. Half the island was witness to our wedding, never mind the guests who came from outside."

"Everyone on the island knows that you married me," Jaime says. "They saw the wedding, or at least heard about it. But, not knowing that, would they look at the two of us together and take me for your husband?"

"Not knowing who I was, I doubt that anyone would take me for a woman, let alone a wife." It's just the simple truth, even if it still stings a little, because she _is_, not just the one but the other as well now. "Those were your first words to me, if you remember, or something very like." _Is that a woman?_ Not the most auspicious start that two lovers ever had. "But everyone on the island does know who I am, so of course they know you too, when you're with me."

Brienne can't be an ordinary wife. She had thought that Jaime, of all people, understood that. She has to be the Evenstar first, and that's what people need to see when they look at her. She has to prove herself worthy of stepping into her father's shoes. If people look at her and see a bride, a young woman in love, maybe that's all they'll see.

No one ever sees her for who she is. No one ever sees the full person. No one but Jaime.

Until now.

Maybe. Or maybe she’s wronging him in thinking that. Maybe he still sees all of her, but he no longer likes everything he sees.

She feels the knives again, slicing her up inside.

Jaime looks at her, and maybe he sees a little of everything that's going round and round in her head, because he takes her hand in his.

Brienne nearly shoots straight up from her chair to the ceiling in surprise. She knows that his hand is warm, no more than that, but his touch comes as such a shock that it feels as hot as a brand against her skin.

"I don't-" Jaime says, and stops, clearly uncertain of how to continue, but he doesn't let go of her hand. His fingers close even tighter around hers. His expression is still not quite right, somehow, and yet Brienne feels as if he's on his way back to her, across his own personal frozen wasteland. "I talk a lot. Too much, some people would say. Some people have said." A tiny glint of humour shows in his eye for just a moment. He's talking about her. And then it's gone again. "But sometimes… I like to listen. Sometimes I want to hear."

"You want me to call you 'husband'." Brienne says.

"Not even call me that. Just say it. Sometimes. Just… show that my place is beside you. Wherever we happen to be."

_Even if someone comes in and finds us lying in bed together._

He doesn't say the words, but Brienne hears them anyway.

They share a long, solemn look.

"I can… I can try," Brienne says. "But it—that sort of thing—being _visible_, it doesn't come easily to me. And sometimes I have to be the Evenstar, and not just a wife. _Your_ wife."

He smiles at that, just a little, acknowledging her attempt, even if his smile is still not quite right. It's a rueful smile, and a little sad and self-mocking, but at least it's not the Kingslayer's shark-like flash of teeth.

Brienne hates that smile just the same.

"I know," he says. "I… won't get in the way of that. Not any more than I can help." He lets go of her hand and gets up.

Brienne feels the loss of his touch, as if he's moving away from her, back behind the barrier he threw up before she even knew what was happening. She's not entirely sure that she does know what's happened, even now.

"I really do need to get down to the marble mines," Jaime says.

Brienne rises to her feet as well. "That's it?" she asks. "That's all?"

"Think about why I might have wanted to breakfast with my wife in our bedroom this morning." Jaime's still smiling, and Brienne still hates it.

"So… it's a test?" she says slowly.

Jaime shakes his head. "No, not a test. Just think about it."

"You couldn't just tell me?"

He smiles yet again, that almost-but-completely-not-right smile, and then he turns to pull shirt and breeches from the press.

It's a dismissal, unmistakably, even if things are not so tense between them as they were a minute or two ago. Brienne clenches her fists by her sides. Part of her would dearly love to slam Jaime up against the wall and _demand_ that he tell her, and not play these stupid games. She would do that without hesitation to the Kingslayer, and even to Ser Jaime, if he proved sufficiently irritating. But she won't do it to Jaime. Whatever is on his mind is wrapped up in too much hurt for her to treat it so ungently.

She crosses the room to the door.

Jaime doesn't turn around, doesn't make any move to come and kiss her goodbye, as he has every morning of their marriage up until now. Two weeks. Who would have thought it could turn out to be so short? But then, Brienne never really expected even to be granted the two weeks.

"All right. I'll do that. I'll think about it," she says. It's not just about what he wants from her, that's clear. It's about what he… wants.

She doesn't kiss him goodbye, either.

The time isn't right. Not yet.

~*~

Brienne does think about it. She thinks of little else through the long morning audience that she holds once every week for any resident of Tarth who wishes to bring a problem before the Evenstar. These are many and varied. Sometimes it's a dispute, usually about borders, or rights to fisheries and moorings, or the ownership of anything from cattle and sheep to—on one memorable occasion—a set of false teeth made from ivory. Other times, Brienne hears grievances over perceived injustices—inheritances are popular subjects for these—or accusations of crimes against people or property.

In the months since she arrived back on Tarth and took up the mantle of the Evenstar, she's always given each and every petitioner her full attention, no matter how seemingly petty the matter. Brienne has always known her duty, and been determined to carry it out to the fullest extent possible, and the duty that the Evenstar owes her people is no exception.

Her full attention is not on any of those who come before her today. She listens, and nods in what she hopes are the appropriate places, but all the details go in one ear and out the other, no matter how hard she tries to concentrate. All she can hear is Jaime's voice, asking her to think about what he said.

Why couldn't he simply have told her what was bothering him? Why did he have to act as if it were some sort of secret? Surely-

Oh.

A secret.

"Cersei," Brienne breathes.

The man in front of her stares at her in puzzlement. "My lady?" he asks. He's middle-aged and bald, dressed in brown landsman's garb and holding his cap nervously in both hands like a shield against his chest.

Brienne stares back, and realises she has absolutely no idea what he's been talking about for the past five minutes.

Podrick saves her, stepping forward, as if with some information for the Evenstar's ears alone. "I believe Master Edmond has provided sufficient evidence that the goat belongs to him, my lady. If it were my decision, I would rule in his favour," he whispers.

Brienne pretends to consider this for a moment, nodding slowly. "Thank you, Ser Podrick," she says, and then, turning to the man before her and raising her voice, "Master Edmond, the goat is yours. The Evenstar has so decreed."

The man bows clumsily. "Thank you, my lady. Thank you. You have my eternal gratitude. All of my family…" He's still trying to bow and express his thanks when the guards point him—not unkindly—in the direction of the door. One gives him a gentle prod with the hilt of his sword.

The door warden thumps his staff and announces the next petitioner.

Brienne manages to keep some of her attention on the next case and the next, just enough to be able to pronounce some sort of reasonable judgement, or what she hopes is a reasonable judgement, at the end. She's forgotten each and every one of them by the time the door warden thumps his staff again.

She's aware that people are watching her oddly, or as if it's she who is being odd, and she can't really blame them. Today she's quieter even than is usual for her, but her mind is alive with words and thoughts, and many, many questions.

This morning was the first time Brienne has ever experienced being caught in bed with anyone. Not that they were really _caught_ exactly. They were just in their own bed together, which shouldn't have been so very remarkable, except that Brienne is still not used to being _seen_ like that. Jaime, of course, is older than she, and more experienced in most worldly matters, so…

But not more experienced in this particular thing. Now that Brienne has had time to think about it, she's as sure as she can be that this morning was a first for Jaime, too. Cersei…It's like a stab to Brienne's heart just thinking the name, never mind letting her mind picture the scene, but she forces herself to consider it properly, because that's where the answer lies.

Cersei would never have let Jaime stay until morning, not in all the years that he shared her bed, and most particularly not after she married Robert Baratheon. It was a secret, a dirty, dangerous, potentially fatal secret, should anyone ever discover Cersei and Jaime together like that. Had it left Jaime feeling like the embodiment of that secret? A dirty, filthy shameful little secret in human form?

And this morning Brienne had acted as if Jaime wasn't there, beside her. She hadn't intended it to be so, aware only of her own embarrassment, but maybe that very self-consciousness of hers had made him feel unwelcome—had made him wonder if perhaps she felt that this somehow _wasn't_ his rightful place, in their bed, right beside her. Could that be it?

Brienne hates to be _seen_, but maybe that's just what Jaime needs. Such a small thing. She'd give it to him in an instant, if only he were to ask, and to the seven hells with her own embarrassment. She'd get over it. She _will_ get over it, in time.

But of course Jaime wouldn't ask. Not directly. He'd just… order breakfast sent up to them on trays, and give her no opportunity to change her mind about it beforehand.

Brienne closes her eyes and lets out a long, weary sigh.

_Of course_ that's what he would do.

"My lady?"

Brienne opens her eyes. "I'm fine, Podrick," she says.

"Of course you-, I mean, I'm very pleased to hear it, my lady, but, well, I was about to tell you that a messenger has just arrived."

"Yes?" Brienne asks, steeling herself to hear about whatever fresh minor crisis she will have to deal with next. A messenger arriving out of the blue is rarely good news.

"There's been an accident at the marble mines. Some sort of collapse, or cave-in. The messenger wasn't entirely clear about that part. But there's people trapped. They're going to need as many extra men as-"

But Brienne is already out of the chair that sits in the centre of the Evenstar's dais, and halfway down the stairs.

"The audience is done for today," she says, not looking back as she hitches up the heavy formal robes of the Evenstar. She's glad she thought to wear her breeches underneath. Her booted feet clatter on the marble floor.

Jaime went to the mines this morning. He's probably already throwing himself into the rescue effort—unless he's one of those in need of rescue. And even if he is, he _will_ be all right. Brienne won't allow anything less.

He's hers now, after all the years of loving and longing and not doing anything about it. The gods could not be so cruel as to take Jaime from her today, on the only morning that they didn't share a goodbye kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to slipsthrufingers, Nire and Telanu for listening to me yell about this story and offering calm advice when needed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brienne arrives at the marble mines, not knowing what she's going to find there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to slipsthrufingers, Nire and firesign for looking this chapter over.

It's a good hour's ride from Evenfall Hall to the Tarth marble mines, along narrow mountain tracks on terrain that can be treacherous and prone to slippage, especially after the heavy rain they've had lately.

Brienne makes the journey in somewhat less than forty-five minutes. 

All she can think of, all the way, is that at least an hour had already passed _before_ the messenger arrived with the news. She's seen injured men die in far less time than that. Far less. She spurs her horse on faster, and tries to think of something else. Anything else.

She fails.

By the time Brienne arrives at the mine head, her horse is in a lather, near spent, and her riding companions have been left far behind. She leaps from her saddle in an instant and thrusts her reins into the hands of a startled man waiting for her at the mine entrance, commanding that he find someone to tend to her horse. And then she turns to his companion, the older of the two.

"You're the foreman?" Brienne asks, not waiting for the man to finish bowing to her or uttering whatever words of greeting he had planned.

"I am, my lady. I am Foreman Edgarth, at your service."

He tries to bow again, but Brienne stops him with one hand hard against his shoulder. "Tell me what happened," she says.

"I'll do better than that, my lady," Edgarth says. "I'll show you. Please, this way."

He leads her in through the mine entrance, which isn't far; certainly not far enough to be dignified with the description of 'tunnel'. They emerge out onto what looks like the top of a cliff, but of course it's not anything as natural as that. Below them, at the bottom of a dizzyingly long sheer drop, lies the main mine, a vast expanse of creamy white rock, with a pool of greeny-blue water at one end. 

The mine is roughly rectangular, straight on three sides where generation after generation of miners have cut out block after block of marble, slowly carving out the manmade chasm that they see now. On the fourth side, opposite the pool of water, the mountain remains untamed. There are patches of gorse and gnarly trees, clinging on to the hillside tenaciously here and there on what had been a scree slope the last time Brienne had seen it, years before she left Tarth. There's not much scree left. Cutting right through the middle of the slope is a landslide of rock and stone and dirt, left there as if strewn by a careless giant, reaching from halfway up the hill right down to the floor of the cutting. There are men down there, she sees, leaping precariously from one rock to another as they move debris oh-so-carefully, trying not to set off more slippage that might swallow them up as well as they search for survivors.

Brienne has to swallow the lump in her throat before she can make any words come out of her mouth. 

"Who was down there when the landslide occurred?" she asks in a voice that sounds like it belongs to someone else.

"We… we don't rightly know, my lady."

"So there might not have been anyone on the floor of the mine when…"

"No, my lady. There were definitely men down there. We've found… remains. We're just not quite sure which ones as yet."

"My husband... " Brienne begins, and finds that her mouth is suddenly too dry to go on. A small, separate part of her mind observes that she doesn't seem to have any trouble saying the word now. Another voice in her head fiercely tells the first voice to shut up and go away.

"Lord Jaime was here earlier this morning, my lady. No one can remember seeing him for some little while before the… slip happened."

"So he must have left!" The relief washes over Brienne so suddenly that she feels dizzy, and it's all she can do not to grab at the foreman for support.

"I'm sorry, my lady, but…" The man hesitates, but the look on his face says that whatever he has to tell her is not good news.

"Tell me," Brienne bites out. She needs to know. She doesn't want to know. But she _needs_ to know.

"Lord Jaime's horse is still tethered by the stream outside the entrance. Wherever he was when the landslide hit, he went there on foot."

He could be anywhere, Brienne tells herself. He could have… wandered into the forest, maybe, though she has no idea why. He could have… gone somewhere. Anywhere.

Anywhere but down there, in the path of the landslide.

But if Jaime had gone off somewhere on foot, surely he would have returned by now. There would be some sign of his presence apart from his horse, waiting where he had left it when he first arrived here this morning.

Brienne turns her attention back to the men still painstakingly working their way through stone and dirt and broken tree branches below, just as the sun comes out from behind a cloud. Something on top of the pile of debris, close to the mine floor, catches her eye. Something that glints in the sunlight, like gold. Something that—yes, one of the men has spotted it and is lifting it up—_something that's shaped like a hand made of gold_.

Brienne goes completely still. She has to remind herself to breathe—in, and out, in, and out—and it's several seconds or a lifetime or sometime somewhere in between before at last she speaks. "What's the quickest way down there?" She points to where the man is still holding the golden hand.

Edgarth eyes her with uncertainty, as if worried that she might just hurl herself over the edge in her rush to get to the floor of the mine. "There's a stairway, my lady, but…"

"Show me." She's not sure what sort of expression must be on her face, but Edgarth does not argue. He shows her to the top of the stairs without another word.

The stairway is made of wooden slats, the topmost step set on a metal spike that has been driven into the marble wall of the mine. The lower steps hang looser, held together by lengths of thick, sturdy rope, with another metal spike every half dozen steps or so to keep the whole thing reasonably firm and stable. There's quite a gap between each step, and the stairway itself is so steep that it's almost like a ladder. There's a rail on the side, the only thing standing between a person using the stairway and almost certain death, should they lose their footing and fall.

Brienne is on her way down, half stepping, half climbing, before Edgarth has the chance to say another word. He calls out to her, something that sounds like a warning, but she barely heeds him. All of her attention is on the next step and the next. The faster she gets down these stairs, the faster she will get to the bottom, and the faster she gets to the bottom, the faster she can start digging, with her bare hands if need be.

She's nearing the bottom of the stairway, only a little way further to go, when there's an ominous rumbling off to the side and a sudden shout from one of the men below. That's all the warning she gets before the landslide slides some more, sending not just stones but rocks tumbling down the slope. Brienne grabs onto the railing and holds on for dear life as the rocks keep coming. A few seconds later, the river of rocks and dirt and unmoored underbrush hits the bottom section of the stairway with a jolt so hard that Brienne is flung right off the stairs. Not that it matters—the stairs have already fallen away beneath her feet.

A lifetime's worth of training is what saves her. Luckily, she's not wearing cumbersome armour, but just the Evenstar's formal robes tucked haphazardly into her breeches, and riding boots. She manages to land more or less on her feet, if heavily, on top of one of the largest rocks, a fairly flat boulder about twice her size. It’s still rolling, though slowly, over the place where the bottom of the stairs used to be. She stumbles as leather boots meet hard stone, and feels her ankle turn under the weight of the rest of her. She ends up on hands and knees, a sharp pain shooting up from her ankle, as the rock comes to a shuddering halt. Brienne gets slowly to her feet, knowing from experience that the pain won't properly set in for a minute or two. She's going to have a sprain there, and probably a bad one, but it hardly matters.

Nothing matters.

Jaime is lying under those rocks somewhere. After everything they've been through, all the odds they've overcome, the near endless wars in which they were rarely on the same side, the sheer unlikelihood of _anyone_ surviving the battle with the dead at Winterfell... After _all that_, to come out the other side and choose a life of love and peace, together on Tarth, and then for it to end mere months later, just two weeks into their marriage, with Jaime buried under a pile of rocks...

It can't be real. It must be some nightmare. A senseless, pointless brutal nightmare. But Brienne makes herself look over the pile of debris that is even larger than it was before, the smaller stones and other bits and pieces still moving here and there. She takes in the way the rest of it just _sits there_, as if it has any right at all when… And yes, it's all too real.

Jaime is gone, in not much more than a snap of the fingers. Jaime is d-

"Brienne!"

Her neck jackknifes, she looks up so fast. It can't be, she saw the golden hand lying down there on the pile of debris, but she _knows_ that voice, at least as well as she knows her own.

"Jaime!" she yells back, seeing him now, waving frantically from above where he's leaning over the edge, Edgarth at his side.

Brienne waves back, just as frantically.

He's alive.

He's alive.

_He's alive._

And Brienne's legs fold up beneath her, just like that.

It's her ankle, giving up the fight and refusing to keep holding up half of her weight any longer without assistance. Of course it is. What other reason could there be?

"Brienne! Are you injured? Stay where you are! I'm coming down!"

"Jaime, no! I'll be fine! Just don't-" But he's already disappeared from her view. _Just don't go_ is what she wanted to tell him. She doesn't want him to leave her sight. She needs to see him, to be able to reassure herself every single second that he's really there, and not some hallucination that her mind has invented simply because it refuses to accept that his body is down there somewhere, where they found his golden hand.

Brienne tries to get to her feet, and she even manages it, for a moment or two, but it's more arduous than it needs to be to stand there with absolutely nothing to lean on, and she knows she's only putting more pressure on her ankle for no good reason. She lowers herself gingerly to the ground again, and sits there with her knees bent in front of her, looking up anxiously and trying to ignore the thrum of pain that's started up in her ankle.

Not that that's a difficult thing to ignore right now. Her mind is focused on only one thing.

Where is he? Where is he? Where is h-

Jaime appears at the top of the cliff again, and Brienne lets out every breath of air in her lungs. He's alive. He's really, truly alive. Jaime. Her husband.

"Jaime, don't! The stairs aren't safe." She's assailed by the memory of another pit, smaller and dirtier and nothing like so deep as this one, though it did have a bear in it. She can see Jaime now, leaping down to save her, heedless of the distance or danger. Risking his life, simply because she needed him—and he needed her.

Something comes tumbling over the side of the cliff, and Brienne instinctively flinches, but then she sees it fall down in a long, straight line. It's a rope ladder, and it ends some distance above Brienne's head.

Jaime cannot, he simply cannot… He only has one hand. He can't…

But of course he does.

Jaime doesn't so much climb as _slide_ down the rope ladder. Brienne holds her breath as she watches, standing again now. He could so easily…

But of course he doesn't.

In almost no time at all, or possibly half a day—one or the other—Jaime reaches the bottom of the rope ladder, and then drops, landing in a crouch before her. He's on his feet again immediately, and pulling her to him even as Brienne throws her arms around his neck.

Neither of them says a word for long moments. Just to feel him warm and alive and real against her is enough, his fingers digging into her hard through the fabric of her robes, his breath hot against her neck as her own hands clutch tight at his shoulders.

It is enough. It is everything.

Eventually, their grip on each other loosens just enough that they can draw back to look each other in the eyes. There he is, the familiar, well-loved features that together make Jaime. He's a sight that only minutes ago she'd feared never to set eyes on again.

It's a sentiment that apparently Jaime shares, because he says, "Gods, Brienne, when I saw those stairs give way beneath you, saw you falling…" He goes pale. This close, she can see the colour leaving his cheeks.

"I thought you were down there." She tosses her head in the direction the landslide has come from. "I saw your golden hand sitting on top of the rubble, and I thought you were… that you were…" She can't voice the rest, but just buries her face against his shoulder as she lets out one great, heaving sob.

Jaime takes her chin gently in his hand, turning her face away from his tunic, but only so that he can kiss her. The taste of him against her lips is even better than touching him. They're standing there, dusty and dirty, in a mining pit, on a less than completely stable rock at the edge of a landslide, in the late morning sun, right there for anyone to see… and Brienne does not care. Let the miners see. Let _anyone_ see. It's the best kiss in forever, or at least in the whole of her life. Better than that first kiss at Winterfell. Better even than the kiss they shared in the sept after they made their vows, or when their lips met for the first time after that in their bedchamber that night.

This feels like the beginning, perhaps—well, there's no real 'perhaps' about it—because they've so recently been confronted with the threat of the end.

"You came for me," Brienne says, when at last they break apart in need of air. 

"I'll always come for you," Jaime replies, and there's that look in his eyes that tells her that he's not just talking about rescuing her.

Brienne shakes her head, trying to hide the smile she can't quite stop. Jaime will always be… Jaime, and she knows that's something she can't live without. She could survive without it, but she wouldn't _live_, she wouldn't be her whole self without him. 

"Did you really think I wouldn't?" he continues, more serious now.

"I didn't think," Brienne admits. "I just… reacted. I knew that if you were down there, I had to be down there, too. If there was the slightest chance, I had to…" She swallows, hard, and goes silent.

"So you fell into a pit. Again. Wearing pink, no less. Again." Jaime grasps the rose and azure folds of her formal robes. "I think I'm going to forbid my wife from wearing pink in future. It's far too hazardous a colour for my peace of mind."

Brienne raises her eyebrows. "Oh, are you? I think the Evenstar might have something to say about th-"

The rock shifts beneath their feet. Not much, but enough to warn them that they shouldn't stay standing here any longer than they absolutely have to. Brienne stumbles against Jaime, and can't help but wince as pain blooms anew along her foot.

"You're injured!" Jaime says at once. "Where? Show me."

"It's just my foot. I twisted my ankle. It's nothing," Brienne says.

"It's not nothing," Jaime says. "Not if you're noticing the pain enough to let it show on your face—and not when we have to find a way down from here."

He's right, of course. The only way they can go is down. The end of the rope ladder is too high for either of them to leap up and catch, even if Jaime had two hands and Brienne had two uninjured feet.

Jaime lets go of Brienne—she tries not to wince again at the sudden loss of physical contact—and steps close to the edge of their rock to peer over the side. "I think if we were to jump down just here," he says, pointing at a spot a little further along, "we could probably make our way between those two rocks and then… Well, I'm sure we will be able to make up the rest as we go along."

"I'm sure we will," Brienne says, her lips curving up at the edges just a little. After all, that's what they've always done.

"I'll just…" Jaime says, crouching down. He jumps over the side while still finishing the sentence.

Brienne moves to the edge, hobbling a bit now as she tries to keep her weight off the injured ankle. She lowers herself carefully, and sits with her legs dangling over the side of the rock. It's a bit of a drop, maybe five or six feet, but nothing too difficult—or it wouldn't be if not for her ankle. Below, Jaime is waiting. He's standing right beneath her, looking up.

"Let yourself down as slowly as you can," he tells her. "I'll be right here."

He can't possibly be thinking of trying to catch her, can he? "Jaime, get out of the way. You can't catch me. There's too much of me."

"There's exactly the right amount of you," Jaime says. "And as I said, I'll be right here."

"At least step to the side. Just one step."

"Are you going to sit there and argue all day, or are you going to jump down?" Jaime asks.

It's the second real argument they've had in the course of their marriage. Brienne likes it so much better than the first, because Jaime's here with her taking part in it. He's not hiding behind a barrier that she has no hope of reaching through. But she's not going to admit any of that to J- _her husband_. And she's not going to waste any more time sitting around and arguing over something about which she has no real choice.

She slips the rest of the way over the side.

Jaime's there, not to catch her like a child or an ethereal young maiden being rescued from some dark tower, but to grab her by the shoulders, like the fellow knight that she is, and to hold her up before she can land too heavily on her right ankle. Even so, she lets out a gasp that's only partly because of the impact forcing air out of her lungs. Her ankle _hurts_. She's been through worse before, of course. Much worse. Maybe she's growing soft after these months of peace and… well, love. Requited love.

She smiles at Jaime, because she can't help herself, and then she kisses him softly on the lips, because she can't help herself when it comes to that, either. He kisses her back, and time and place and everything but the two of them recedes into the distance.

"My lady!" 

The shout cuts through their preoccupation—and occupation—with each other. The moment is broken, and so is the kiss. Brienne looks up to see two figures looking down at them. One is Edgarth—does the man ever do anything but stand around and wait for other people to do what needs to be done?—and the other is, unmistakably, Podrick.

"Podrick!" Brienne shouts back. He's made good time to get here so soon. He must have ridden hard up the mountain—though not quite so hard as she did herself.

"What do you need of me?" Podrick asks.

This time, it's Jaime who answers. "Take our horses and lead them back down to the Hall. The foreman will show you where they are!"

"What about you, ser? My lady?"

"We'll get ourselves out of here. Just see to the horses!" Jaime says.

Podrick is silent for a moment, clearly waiting for Brienne to speak, so she says, "Yes, what Ser Jaime says. Take the horses!"

"Yes, my lady!" Podrick and Edgarth both disappear back from the edge, and Jaime and Brienne are left alone once more.

"So, how are you planning to get us out of here without horses?" Brienne asks.

"We'll go out through the bottom entrance, where they take the blocks of marble and then-"

"Down the hill to the cove where the cargo boats are anchored," Brienne finishes for him. "How did you know about that?"

Jaime grins. "Where do you think I was when the landslide happened?" And then the grin vanishes again. He takes her hand and presses it to his chest. "I'm sorry that you had to think, even for a moment…"

Brienne shakes her head. "It's all right. Now. It's all right now, because you're here with me, and we're together. The way we should be." 

He draws her hand to his lips and kisses it, looking up at her in such a way that Brienne knows they could easily end up here in this exact spot for the next several hours.

"Let's get moving then," she says. 

"I'll go first, so that I can find the best places for you to put your feet," Jaime says, putting words into action and turning to place his foot in the narrow gap between two boulders before hoisting himself up.

Brienne knows it's the sensible thing to do, that the person without the sprained ankle is the one who should go first, but… She's become used to leading the way, she realises. Perhaps a little too used to it. The mark of a true leader is knowing when to relinquish control, when to put your trust in someone else. She understands now exactly what her father had meant when he told her that, years ago.

Jaime has her trust, all of it, so she follows close behind, walking in his footsteps quite literally.

The terrain beneath their feet is not firm or steady, and more than once Jaime loses his footing as loose dirt and stone shifts beneath a careful step. It's Brienne's turn to grab him when that happens, and they stand there for a moment, watching as what had looked like firm ground falls away, clutching at each other and gasping for breath at each close call.

"Why was your golden hand down in the pit if you weren't?" Brienne asks after a while.

Jaime stops in his tracks, turns, and looks at her. "The strap was starting to fray. One of the young lads working in the mine was—_is_—a leatherworker. His job is to make and maintain the harnesses that they use to haul the cut marble from the pit. He offered to fix the strap for me while I went down to inspect the workings at the cove."

The boy is probably buried under the debris, beneath the place where they found Jaime's golden hand.

"We should keep going," is all Brienne says.

Jaime nods. They continue on, silent for the moment. Jaime is in a sombre mood now, Brienne knows him well enough to pick up on that easily, but the silence between them isn't tense, the way it was over breakfast this morning. They're both focused on the task at hand, working together to achieve their shared goal—and that's something that requires no words.

"My lord? My lady?" Brienne starts at the sound. This voice comes not from the top of the cliff, but from somewhere not all that far away, on the other side of the large rocks that currently obscure their view of everything around them. "If you keep to that side of the rocks and just follow them along, going towards the centre of the pit, you'll find the easiest way down."

"Thank you!" she calls. "We're on our way!"

Jaime makes his way carefully along the line of rocks, in the direction the voice came from, and Brienne follows. They emerge at the other end to find that they are very nearly at the edge of the pile of debris, and quite near the floor of the pit, where a young mine worker stands in wait for them.

Jaime leads the way down, though it's easier now. There's something like a path, worn by many pairs of feet going up and down through here; just up and to the right there's a group of men digging, oh so very carefully, while one of their number sits there, not digging, and talking quietly—to someone trapped there, Brienne realises. 

Jaime jumps down onto the floor of the mine at last, and holds out his hand for Brienne to take as she steps down as gently and easily as she can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, there's still one more chapter to go. It should be along tomorrow or so.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime and Brienne return home to Evenfall Hall, and words are said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to slipsthrufingers and firesign for looking this over for me, and to Nire for helping me find the way into sorting out something that needed sorting.

"Get the cart for my lady," Jaime commands, just as Brienne asks, "How many of the men are unaccounted for?"

The young man—he's really not much more than a boy—looks from one to the other, unsure which of them to respond to first. After a second, his gaze settles on Brienne, and he answers, "Fourteen unaccounted for so far, my lady Evenstar. A further two are trapped,"—he jerks his head in the direction of the rescue group—"and there are a dozen confirmed dead."

Brienne nods. "Tell Foreman Edgarth that more men are on the way to help with the rescue effort, and more supplies. The maester should arrive soon, as well. Edgarth has only to send word should he require anything else."

She should have said all of this to Edgarth himself the moment she arrived at the mine entrance, Brienne realises. But she didn't, because there was only one thought on her mind, and it consumed everything else—all her good sense and reason. Only one thing had mattered.

Perhaps she would be a better evenstar if she did not love Jaime quite so much as she does. If she could find more tameable and civilised emotions with which to care, he would not outweigh her official duties in importance to quite the extent that he does.

But she can't. Her feelings just _are_.

There's something slightly terrifying about that.

"My lord," the boy says, and he pulls something out of a hessian bag lying at his feet and holds it out to Jaime. It's a little more dented and scratched than the last time Brienne saw it up close, but it's unmistakably Jaime's golden hand.

It has a new strap, the leather shiny and unbroken.

"The boy, the one who works on the harnesses? Is he…?" Jaime asks.

"Albreth, my lord. My brother."

Jaime raises his eyebrows in question, and the boy shakes his head. Jaime clasps his hand on the boy's shoulder for a moment. "You've done well today…?" He pauses.

"Alyn, my lord."

"You've done well today, Alyn." He takes the golden hand from the boy at last, weighing it in his true hand for a moment before he says, "Now, go and fetch the cart."

"Yes, my lord." The boy turns and runs, in obvious relief at no longer being the main focus of the two most important people on Tarth.

Once the boy is well out of earshot, Brienne turns to Jaime and says quietly, "You couldn't have saved him, Jaime. If you'd been here, with him…"

"Maybe I could have-"

"No!" Brienne grips his arm, refusing to let him look away or to look away herself. "No, you couldn't. You can't save everyone, Jaime, and I'm _glad_—it's selfish, but I'm _glad_—that you weren't here when the landslide happened, and that you're here with me right now." She's surprised when tears prick at her eyes. She does turn away then, not knowing why she's crying now, when they're on solid ground and safe together, but-

She cries out as she puts her full weight, unthinking, on the injured ankle. Jaime is at her side in an instant, his hand under her arm, letting her lean on him as heavily as she needs to.

"I'm glad I'm here with you too," he says in a low voice.

The way he looks at her then… Nothing more need be said, on either side.

Alyn arrives back with the cart not long after that. The horse that draws it looks to be of uncertain parentage, but strong. It will serve.

Jaime helps Brienne up onto the back of the cart and then leaps up beside her. "Wait!" he says, when Alyn takes up the reins, clearly about to gee up the horse. Jaime unsheathes the dagger that he always carries at his belt. "Hold your boot steady," he tells Brienne. She complies, knowing what's coming. Jaime's dagger is honed sharp and deadly, and it cuts through the leather of the boot as easily as through flesh.

Brienne lets out a gasp as the pressure on her swollen ankle is abruptly gone. Jaime pulls the ruined boot off her foot as slowly and carefully as he can, but it still aches like fury, enough for Brienne to bite her lip against the pain. Jaime lays the bottom half of Brienne's leg across his lap, cushioning the sore ankle as best he can.

"Now!" he calls to Alyn, and the cart moves off, through the lower entry way, past the path that leads up to the top of the mine, where Edgarth is perhaps actually doing something useful now, and down the hill.

It's a rather bumpy ride down the well-worn track to the cove, but it least it doesn't take long. All the way, Brienne is aware of Jaime's hand against her skin, gently stroking along each bare toe in turn, before his hand lifts, bypassing the swollen ankle and sliding along her shin then around to caress her calf. She catches his gaze, catches and holds it, and reaches out with her own hand to find his right arm.

She breathes easier as her hand wraps around his bicep, solid and _there_ against her hand; feels something slowly unclench inside her as she watches his chest move up and down with each breath. When she looks up again, she sees an answering something in Jaime's eyes.

Soon, the beach comes into view, with its piles of marble, waiting to be shipped, and then the long jetty stretching out into the deep water. Alyn drives the cart right to the end of the jetty, where two boats are to be seen. One, waiting at anchor a little further out, is one of the familiar cargo ships that plies the route between Tarth and the mainland. The other boat, a smaller fishing craft, is tied up at the end of the jetty. Alyn halts the cart next to the fishing vessel, and to Brienne's surprise, Jaime hails the man sitting on the deck.

"Erich!"

"Lord Jaime. Back so soon!" Erich gets up unhurriedly. Even on so short an acquaintance, Brienne gets the distinct impression that Erich does everything unhurriedly. He is a man in late middle-age, his thick, clearly once-dark hair streaked liberally with grey, and possessing the sort of girth that her father used to describe as 'prosperous'.

"Brienne, this is Erich, who took me out in his boat to view this side of the island when I was here earlier. Erich, the lady Evenstar, my wife."

The increasingly familiar little thrill goes through Brienne when Jaime introduces her as his wife, not least because of the pride in his voice as he does so, which he makes no attempt to hide. His fingers are still stroking gently against her leg.

"I'd deem it a favour if you could take us around to the harbour," Jaime says.

"Of course, of course. The _Arianna_ and her crew are at your service," Erich says, as if he'd like nothing better. And perhaps he wouldn't.

Alyn and Erich both offer to assist Brienne from the cart and down onto the boat, but somehow it is Jaime alone who gives her his arm as she hobbles the short distance.

He’s still there at her side as Brienne settles herself near the bow, her injured foot submerged in a pail of seawater from off the port side. It's not quite as effective as the ice from the storage caverns in the hills behind the Hall would be, but the cold water does help dull the pain somewhat. Erich calls 'the boys'—who turn out to be his far from boyish sons—back from the beach, where they've been helping load supplies for the rescue effort onto carts. In hardly more than a few moments after that, the fishing boat is pulling away from the jetty as its sails catch the stiff sea breeze.

Brienne turns her face into the wind, letting it pummel gently against her face for a few seconds as she breathes in the fresh, salty air. She turns back to Jaime and finds him watching her. He doesn't say anything, something that she once would have thought wildly out of character for him, but now she knows him better. She knows what this day nearly cost him, quite as much as she knows how much it nearly cost her. He slips his right arm around her, holding her close against him as his hand reaches up to cup her face.

It's not a passionate kiss, or at least, no more passionate than any of their kisses, so of course there is some passion to it, but it's gentle and slow. An affirmation that neither of them is one alone any longer, nor ever shall be again.

After a while, Brienne lays her head on Jaime's shoulder and breathes him in. He smells better than the sea air, better than anything. She knows that it can't always be like this, that there are words that need to be spoken, issues between them that she can't allow to let slide. But those can wait until they're back at the Hall, until they're _home_ again. For now, Jaime is here, alive and whole beside her, his hand clasped in both of hers, and it's everything she needs.

~*~

The trip back to the Hall is uneventful, if slow, as Erich and his sons negotiate the reef that lies just beneath the surface along this part of the coast. It has seen the ruin of many an unwary seafarer over the centuries, and not a few would-be conquerors from the east intent on taking the sapphire isle for themselves.

At last the _Arianna_ turns into the harbour, and soon Erich is tying her up at the wharf. Brienne and Jaime give their thanks and make their farewells, and then Jaime's giving her his hand to lean on again as she hoists herself up and onto the dock.

A carriage is waiting for them, proof if Brienne needed any that Podrick has arrived back ahead of them, or at least sent word. It's the closed carriage, inevitably, the one conveyance that Brienne never has any patience with, because it's lumbering and slow. She'd rather travel on horseback, or at least ride in the open carriage, or, better yet, simply walk up the hill to the Hall. But this is the only option she has, so she gets in, and yes, it's good to be able to prop her ankle up in Jaime's lap once more—not that she's going to admit that. Jaime is watching from the backwards seat, though, and she can tell that he sees exactly what she's thinking without either of them saying a word.

If he smiles, he makes sure to smile inside, where Brienne can't see it. His hand seeks out her leg again, like iron to a lodestone, and Brienne lets out a long sigh.

It's slow going, again, once the carriage comes to a stop at the Hall's main entrance. Slow to get down from the carriage, slow to make it up the few steps to the huge old double doors, slow to walk across the entrance hall and then, slowest of all, to make her way up the staircase to their bedchamber. It's not even the pain itself that's making her impatient, but the need to go slowly so as to not make the injury any worse than it already is, after their part walk, part scramble, part climb, out of the pile of debris left by the landslide.

But all the way, Jaime's arm is a constant, reassuring presence beneath her hand.

They need to be alone together, for more than one reason, but when at last they make it to the bedchamber door, Brienne finds that they're not destined to be alone just yet. Old Marta awaits them, clicking her tongue as she spies Brienne's bare foot. She's known Evenfall Hall far longer than Brienne has, perhaps even longer than Brienne's father did, so there's not much Brienne can do in the way of ordering that Marta leave them, or even protesting that she's fine. It's all water off a duck's back as Marta—all four feet and eleven inches of her—very politely but firmly pushes Jaime out of the way and fusses at Brienne until she is sitting up on the bed with her right foot elevated on a pile of cushions.

Jaime mutters something about the maester then, and Marta clicks her tongue again—at him this time. "The Seven's sake, milord, old Marta knows how to deal with a twisted ankle. We don't need to bring the maester back from the mine just for that."

She's true to her word, ready with cloths and ice fetched down from the caverns, but when at last she closes the door behind her, admonishing Brienne to remove the ice after twenty minutes, everything feels somehow anti-climactic.

Jaime sits down on the edge of the bed, and shares a long look with Brienne. He doesn't reach out to touch her leg or take her hand, as she's more than half-expecting, and suddenly the distance between them feels more like a yawning chasm.

She doesn't know what to say. It's not that she's shy, not really, or at least not when they're alone like this. She just... doesn't know what to say. She was full of words unspoken when first they were reunited at the bottom of the cliff, and she felt as if she were holding half the available words in the whole of Tarth inside her on the boat trip back, but now… The prosaic nature of treating a minor injury, dealing—or not dealing—with Marta, and being back at home on her own bed has somehow broken the spell.

Brienne glances away, her gaze coming to rest on the chest by the bed. A teapot and two cups have been left there, just where the tea things were at breakfast. It reminds her that they never got to drink their tea then, and piling on top of that, before she can do anything to stop them, come the memories of everything else that happened before they parted less than peaceably this morning.

"Would you like some tea?" she asks.

"Thank you," Jaime says, almost as if they're just acquaintances observing the social niceties.

Almost.

Brienne leans over a little awkwardly and pours two cups of tea. It's one of the duties of the lady of the house, pouring tea. It was one of the many things that her septa drummed into her as a girl—one of the many things that Brienne could never seem to get right. She'd chipped three of the delicate, translucent porcelain cups from the fancy tea set that had once belonged to her mother, made by some secret process in Asshai, before her septa had admitted that Brienne was just too big, too clumsy, to be trusted with something so dainty. After that, she'd been allowed to go back to using the set her father preferred, made of far less elegant, common tin glaze pottery of the sort to be found the length and breadth of Westeros.

Inevitably, she splashes some of the tea as she pours, twisting to the side a little as she has to with her foot propped up like that, but at least she doesn't smash anything.

Their fingers brush as Brienne hands the cup to Jaime, and she's suddenly so aware of that tiny point of contact that she starts, her eyes flying to his face as tea slops over the side of the cup.

Next she knows, the cup goes flying, spilling tea everywhere before it smashes into a hundred pieces on the floor, but she doesn't have attention to spare for it because she's pressed back against the headboard with Jaime's face bare inches from her own, his left hand braced beside her head as he leans in and kisses her.

There's nothing slow or lacking in passion about this kiss, even if it's over almost as soon as it's begun.

"Brienne," Jaime breathes against her lips. "I thought… Today, I thought, when I saw you fall…" And he buries his face in the crook of her neck as her hand comes up to gently pet his hair in soft strokes, over and over.

"Jaime," she says. "Jaime, Jaime, Jaime…"

Like the smashed plate this morning, the sudden violence of the cup breaking against the floor has shattered the mood between them, but this time it's a mood that needed shattering.

They've seen each other face dire threats before, faced them together, from the moment Jaime jumped into the bearpit with her right up to the night they fought the dead back to back and lived to tell the tale. But it's different now, for Brienne and, clearly, for Jaime, too, and not just because they both made the choice to leave the life of the warrior behind them. Imagining Jaime facing death and there not being a single thing she could do about it had near broken Brienne this morning, but Jaime had _seen_ her fall and been just as powerless in the face of it…

So Brienne keeps running her fingers through his hair and murmuring his name, as if there's something magical in it, like an incantation or a prayer, and perhaps there is. At least, there is for Brienne.

When Jaime lifts his head and pulls back from her, what feels like a long time later, his eyes are bright, but he looks more or less like his usual self. He rolls off her, onto his side of the bed, and once he's sitting beside her, his hand reaches for and finds hers.

"Today's our birthday," he says abruptly, not looking at her, but his grip tightens on her hand.

Brienne does her best not to let any reaction show on her face, or at least nothing too bad, but her heart aches at that 'our'—though more for Jaime than for herself. Whatever else they were to each other when they were grown, and whatever else they were _not_ to each other after Jaime came north to Winterfell to fight for the living—and to be with Brienne—nothing can change the fact that Jaime and Cersei came into the world together. And now there is only Jaime. He will probably always think of himself as a twin, but now he's a twin without his twin.

"I thought your nameday was more than a month away," Brienne says, as neutrally as she can.

Jaime looks down at their joined hands. It's as if he's drawing strength from that simple connection between them, as he breathes out heavily and says, "It is, but today is the anniversary of the day that we- that _I_ was born. Cersei and I were almost six weeks old by the time we were named in the light of the Seven."

"Why did your parents wait so long?" Brienne asks. Such a gap between a child's birth and their naming is almost unheard of, most particularly for any member of one of the great families. Should a child be taken by the Stranger while it remains nameless, it will wander the afterlife alone forever, never knowing who its people are, never knowing where it belongs. How could Tywin Lannister, of all people, countenance such a risk for his trueborn children?

"My mother was very ill afterwards, both times she was in childbed. I have been told that my father delayed our naming until she was able to rise from her bed and attend the ceremony."

"But you don't believe that." Brienne has learned to read Jaime's voice even better than his face in the time they've been together since the-end-of-the-world-that-wasn't. She knows the significance of every tiny pause and subtle intonation. He doesn't believe his father's actions were benign, of that she is quite sure.

"Twins often come early, so they tend to be smaller and weaker than other babes, more prone to every ailment. It would be utterly like my father to make certain that we were expected to survive before he formally claimed us." Jaime's hand tightens around hers even more, and Brienne returns his grip just as hard.

She wonders, but does not ask, how many days or weeks, or even months, passed between Tyrion Lannister's birth and the day he was named.

"Those first weeks, Cersei and I belonged only to each other. Perhaps that was why, one of the many reasons why, that ultimately…"

Brienne isn't conscious of trying to take her hand back—not until Jaime's fingers dig into her palm, stopping her.

"I don't miss her," he says, turning at last to look deep into Brienne's eyes, pinning her with a look as surely as a spear going straight through a fish—or a knight—and not letting her look away, even though she really, desperately wants to. "I think back to all the time I wasted, believing that I was everything to Cersei as she was to me, and all I regret is that I didn't work it out years earlier. But then, if I had, where else might I have been the night Catelyn Stark brought Ser Brienne of Tarth to the Kingslayer's cell at Riverrun?" There's an intensity to him now, not just in his expression but in his voice, the timbre deeper and more resonant than usual.

Brienne lets her hand relax in Jaime's grip. "I wasn't a knight then," she reminds him, which is idiotic, because he knows that better than anyone.

"No, not then, but you should have been," Jaime says.

"But if I'd already been a knight then, what else might have turned out differently? What might—or might not—have happened, at Winterfell the night before the battle—and the night after?"

"It's a good question," Jaime says. "All I can say is that I don't regret the path that led us here—some of the detours and byways, yes, but never the path itself—because I could never regret being here, with you. I don’t miss… almost anything of what I was. I don't even miss being a twin, exactly. It's just… strange, sometimes." His thumb strokes the side of her hand, stopping only to rub circles into her palm. It's oddly comforting.

"Like today."

"Like today," Jaime agrees.

"I think I know," Brienne begins, slowly, carefully, "why you were… the way you were this morning. I spent most of the rest of the morning thinking of little else, until word came from the mines."

Jaime raises her hand to his lips and kisses it. "I'm sorry," he says, simply, sincerely, as if that's all it takes to fix things. As if it could be so easy.

Brienne wants to believe that it is that easy—but of course it can't be.

"I… I'll try to do better in future. I'm not… I'm not _ashamed_, I just…" She knows she's going red. Even just trying to explain why she is the way she is feels mortifying.

Jaime shakes his head, his voice low as he says, "Don't apologise, not to me. I'm the one who should be apologising."

"You already did," Brienne points out.

"Cersei," he begins, and of course he's still holding Brienne's hand so he must feel her almost imperceptible flinch when he says _that name_ once more, but he still doesn’t let go of her. He doesn’t stop talking, either. "I couldn't hurt her." Brienne knows that something of the pang she cannot stop herself from feeling must be showing on her face, because he adds quickly, "No, I don't mean it like that. I mean that she couldn't be hurt by me. I didn't have that power. I think I knew, deep down, that I couldn't hurt her, long before I understood what it meant that I couldn't. I found other ways of getting her attention…" He looks down at their joined hands, and then up at Brienne again, setting his jaw as if against some almost insurmountable foe. "For a moment, this morning, I forgot that I had the power to hurt you. I promise I'll do better in future. I'll strive to be the husband you deserve."

Brienne blinks, hard, and says, "I don't know about the husband I deserve, but you're already the husband I want. A most beloved husband." She reaches up to touch his cheek, watching him. He looks back at her so earnestly that she's sure her heart skips a beat—and then he blinks and suddenly there's an altogether different look in his eye.

"A most beloved husband? Really?" he says, and oh, Brienne knows that light in his eyes, and the slow devilish grin curving his lips.

She's missed that expression on his face today, so much that she can't regret saying those words. They'd be weapons in the wrong hands, swords and spears and arrows to her heart, but she trusts him with them. He might do his very best to tease her to death sometimes, but he'd sacrifice himself and probably most of Tarth as well before he allowed any harm to come to her that he had the slightest chance of preventing.

She slides her foot out from beneath the icy cloths. Has it been twenty minutes? Brienne has no idea, but decides she can always put the cloths back later. Her ankle is blooming into interesting shades of red and purple, but she's dealt with far worse before. Manoeuvring herself on the bed is a little more challenging than usual as she tries not to put pressure on her foot, but she ends up where she wants to be without all that much difficulty.

She places her hands on Jaime's shoulders as she straddles his thighs and looks down at him with what she hopes is a devilish grin of her own—or at least a smile with plenty of promise in it. "Really," she says, leaning forward.

This kiss is longer than the last one, and the promise turns out to be very far from one-sided. When they pause for breath, Jaime asks, "In the afternoon, Brienne?" It's almost a tease, except that there's a serious question mixed in there, too.

"I can take my husband to bed for the afternoon if I want. After all, we're married." It feels daring to say it, but it's also just the simple truth.

"Yes, we are," Jaime agrees, but everything he's not saying is there in his eyes for Brienne to see.

There's no more talking for a long time after that.

~*~

Marta knocks on the door of the Evenstar's bedchamber around mid-afternoon. She waits, and when there's no response she knocks again. There's still no response. They must have gone downstairs. She clicks her tongue. Lady Brienne should be resting with her foot up, not trying to see to everything in Tarth all at once by herself, and her new husband is hardly better. They'll wear themselves out, the pair of them, and not for the sorts of reasons that newlyweds should.

She's just reaching for the doorknob, intending to go into the room to replace the cloths for milady's injured foot, when a loud sound comes from the other side of the door. Marta freezes, and presses her ear to the door. Her hearing is not what it once was. And there it comes again: a loud, high-pitched giggle.

Marta doesn't remember ever hearing Lady Brienne giggle. Not since she was a tiny thing, hardly taller than the other children her age, in any event.

The deep, amused rumble of a man's voice comes then. And… quiet.

She turns away from the door, but before she can take another step, a long moan splits the silence. And another.

Marta smiles reminiscently as she walks away. She'll tell the maids not to come up to clean until later. Much later.

**Author's Note:**

> <strike>Um, yeah, I know this _technically_ isn't a ficlet any more, but I'm not changing the name of the series.</strike>
> 
> *waves white flag*
> 
> The emotions in this one got complicated and needed A LOT more words, so the name of the series has been changed to After Everything.
> 
> Also, I'm [luthienebonyx](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/luthienebonyx) at tumblr, if you want to talk to me over there.


End file.
